kamiel [at] creativechoice.org

I decide to meet someone today I call that person Sara because that’s what first comes to my mind. She was not on our overnight bus to Santiago de Chile, I didn’t meet her on the streets of this five million metropole with the 02 area code, neither was it the woman that sold me a ticket at the musuem entrance. She just fell down from the sky, so to speak, almost like a fictitious person. Well I said doesn’t that hurt, intentionally using the negative expression to show that I had presupposed it would hurt because falling from the sky normally does. In her case, it obviously didn’t hurt but how could I know? Besides, when I would have known all about her being like a feather and all I would never have talked to her and she would never have known about my existence and a lot of beautiful interaction would never have occured. So I asked her if she was hurt and looked at her arm to see if there were bruises and scratches but she was immaculate. She just smiled and told me her name was Sara and I thought something new is happening here. Well Sara I said aren’t you hot, knowing that up there in the sky the temperature is a lot lower (I’ve been on an airplane more than once). Again I supposed Sara would feel in the same way I do, and again I was wrong. But she obviously liked my wrongness, because she smiled once more. She wasn’t hot at all, she said she was rather cold because where she came from they could heat each other with their souls. I looked at her and laughed, I told her listen I put you on hold because I just wanted to let her wait. She was really beautiful and I was attracted to her but here I felt I had some power and couldn’t resist to exert it. Frankly, I wanted to blow the cold air of our human condition in her face, instead of being heated up by her superhuman prettiness. Just wait for me Sara, just wait indefinitely until I come back.

Words should be fresh when they are written down. But the freshness of words cannot be measured by their individual smell or structure like fruits. They are all connected and build up a giant web that can have a dusty or a fresh aura. And there is another particularity. One moldy word can increase the freshness of its neighbours.

In Santiago we spent a night with Ronald, a Dutch translator about my age who travels with his boyfriend and works in every city for a couple of weeks before moving on. He used the same computer model as I did and would probably have the same shoe size too. It was kind of funny, like meeting someone who actually is in your skin. “How do you do it?”We walked around a bit to explore Santiago since we were all new to the city. Ended up with a meal from the micromarket consisting of paltas (avocados), bread, bad wine, lettuce, yoghurt, and cheese. The couch was tough to unfold but it worked out fine in the end, whining and cracking like the odd coincidence of our meeting. Reflections about this were due. At least I could say something about the meaning that sticks to almost everything like dripping honey. Every cracking sound, the position of the chairs, the purring of a cat, the smell of onions that you’re supposed to cut, the height of the ceiling, the bubbles that rise to the surface of your tablewater, the spiral form of the light saving bulb, it all has some gigantic symbolic meaning, it’s satisfied with meaning like dough is satisfied with eggs. Don’t touch anything please, the meaning might squirt all over the place.